MEDCO
The MedCo case study is an interactive approach to walking through Chapter 6 of the Red Book (Scrum: the Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time). It will introduce the power of empowered Product Owners, Scrum's focus on planning for reality using empiricism, and the importance of sustainable pace. You will use mentimeter or a similar live quizing platform to guide your learners through a critical thinking exercise.
Outcomes
- Learners will understand what empiricism is
- Learners will be able to explain how Scrum was rolled out at MedCo
- Learners will be able to communicate the power of an empowered Product Owner
Activities
- Interactive MedCo casestudy (get your producer to help setup mentimeter if you don't already have this)
Outline
A Familiar Story
Establish the scenario with MedCo in which the CEO failed to check in with his team before he made a bold claim to Wallstreet. He set the expectation that MedCo would change the world of pharmaceutical supply chain within one year. Unfortunately, after a 6 month planning period, his team determined it would actually take far longer to deliver than the date that was set.
Scrum is based on empiricism
Ask your learners what they would do: 1. Skip testing: Obviously we don't want to do this, skipping quality is never an option 2. Add more team members: Adding people to a project that is already late will just make it more late 3. Tell everyone to work twice as fast: Forced marches reduce quality and increase burnout, this is a bad idea 4. Implement Scrum: while a bit obvious (this is a Scrum course), this is the best option. Let them know that this means stopping work and training everyone on a new process. This is what MedCo chose to do.
Explain the pillars of empiricism and that Scrum plans for reality. While MedCo came up with a 6 month plan, the reality is that very little would actually go according to that plan. Scrum responds quickly to a changing world and updates the plan and projections on a daily basis making it much more likely to be successful than traditional project management.
Implementing Scrum resulted in a much better projection than they had with their original plan, but it isn't good enough yet.
Scrum Makes Problems Visible
Ask your team what they would do to help the team meet their date: 1. Hire better team members: Once again, adding people to a project that is late, will just make it more late. 2. Ask our team to cut corners: While MVPs are the way to go, we need to be careful about cutting corners, this isn't a good option 3. Ask our team what's blocking them: Much better option, but Scrum needs a bias to action. Get the work done, don't just talk about It 4. Remove blockers: Remove the impediments, everyone should be focused on removing things that will slow your team down (impediments), this is what MedCo determined
Explain that by moving faster, issues that already exist in a company will become much more visible quickly. While this might feel bad at first, visibility allows you to quickly solve problems.
By removing impediments, MedCo accelerated significantly and were able to get far more accomplished, but they still aren't within their deadline.
Ask your learners what they would do next: 1. Remove more impediments: yes, do this, but this impacts things in the future, we want an option that will help now 2. Work hard for a few months: this is definitely something that people will do, but we don't have to do this in Scrum, there is a better way 3. Increase focus and swarm: again, a great option, but this is something that might work or might now, we still want something whith the highest chance of working 4. Reprioritize: Scrum has empowered Product Owners, in MedCos case, they realized they only needed to implement in one warehouse, by refocusing the teams on this, they were able to quickly meet and exceed their goals
Empowered Product Owners are able to quickly identify the most important things and optimize value delivery to best meet originizational goals. MedCo was successful in meeting their commitment to Wall Street. a few years later, they were bought by ExpressScripts for billions! That is the power of Scrum.